We've had to shut down or remove an unusual number of threads in the last few days. I assume everyone knows that political discussions are off topic here, but I'd like to take a moment to point out a couple of our forum policies that people may not be familiar with.

Most of the threads we have closed have one thing in common, they were general topics posted on one of the Personal subforums: Investing - Help with Personal Investments, Personal Finance and Personal Consumer Issues. New threads in each of these subforums must meet the following requirements

- It must be personal. In other words, you must be asking about your own situation. You can also ask on behalf of someone specific, such as a family member.

- It must be actionable. You must be able to do something specific with the replies that will make a difference in your situation.

To illustrate I'll give some examples from real threads.

Locked, neither personal, nor actionable.

Nice article over on learnvest about immigrant parents. Obviously I agree with the general tenor of the piece, though there are always exceptions to the author's generalization of immigrant parents; plus, there are always cases within the immigrant parent subset where the parents are diametrically opposite in how they handle money.

OK

First of all, i have started thinking about my parents' retirement plan... We're immigrants so my parents don't even speak very well english and they still have the european mentality of keeping cash in the house rather than investing or giving to the bank...

Locked, not personal (and it's about proposed legislation, which is also off topic).

Robert Pozen writes about 529 plans and has a few suggestions to try to get folks to use them more. But first, one has to have money to put into them, so I liked the article because it agrees with me...

OK

I am ready to open a 529 Plan for my one-year-old daughter, and I am considering the Maryland 529 Plan and the NY 529 Plan. The MD 529 is managed by T. Rowe Price and the NY Plan is managed by Vanguard. Everything else being equal, the major considerations for my decision are:...

Removed, neither personal nor actionable.

I was digging around our local Police & Fire Public Pension website recently because, like many, the funded ratio dropped again (below 80% this past year.) While this fund doesn't affect me directly, as a citizen taxpayer, it can indirectly.

To say this pension fund is actively managed would be an understatement. Full of high expense funds. The 'financial consultants' who meet with the pension board every month and provide their advice for what to sell and buy. It is a local firm who runs my wife's 401k, which leaves a little to be desired. Anyway, looking through the minutes of previous meetings, it appears the consultants just recommend funds and the board blindly approves these. There is an Investment Policy which looks good, but they are turning over a lot of funds frequently. Expenses are supposed to maintain a level comparable to average expenses (which is a joke.)

OK

The division of the company I work for was recently sold to another company. Because of this, employees have an opportunity to cash out their fixed benefit pension with the previous company.
Some of the choices I have are the following.
(My length of employment is not that great, which is reflected in the payout)

Lump sum: ~$22K which can be moved to an IRA.
Immediate annuity of ~ $100 per month.
Annuity starting at age 55 of ~$370/month
Annuity starting at age 65 of ~$525/month.

[note: Multiple tangential posts have been removed from the replies. I'm leaving this response to several of those posts because it neatly summarizes what we are trying to achieve with the requirements noted above - admin alex]

While I understand that people on this board often say "why are you using this board" when people seek answers to questions about what they should do regarding subjects such as guns, many of us seek advice on this site about issues that may not normally be on this site BECAUSE we want intelligent responses from like-minded people. As an example, I posted asking for advice on tithing/charitable giving. The moderators were very patient and helped me with wording to keep it on task. For those who like to say "this question does not belong here," why then do we allow discussions about washing detergent, plumbing, and the like? While some questions may need re-wording, please understand that some of us want legitimate advice. If a subject offends you, do not try to uproot the thread by causing problems. Move along. In my previous example about charitable giving, I was asking people who did not understand finances. Asking here made more sense, as I was asking about a financial topic to gain an understanding of how other business savvy people would thing about the topic. That is why we have conversations about guns, washing detergent, and automobiles. 1000 thanks to the moderators, who try to balance minimizing drama with information production by the members.

I'm not a financial professional. Post is info only & not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship exists with reader. Scrutinize my ideas as if you spoke with a guy at a bar. I may be wrong.

Not to be critical of the mods because I am not doing that nor do I want anyone to suspect it or accuse me of it so I'm getting that out in the open, I just don't understand why some threads that don't seem to abide by the objectives of the forum are left open when similar ones are closed. It must be subtle or objective. I'm reading or following a thread and bam it's closed. I'm doing the same for another that is along the same vein (not following the objectives) and it remains open. Now ask me for an example! There are a lot but off the top of my head I can't name one but I do see it.

zaplunken wrote:Not to be critical of the mods because I am not doing that nor do I want anyone to suspect it or accuse me of it so I'm getting that out in the open, I just don't understand why some threads that don't seem to abide by the objectives of the forum are left open when similar ones are closed.

The moderators don't read every thread, and it takes them some time to read threads even when they do, so some lockable threads last for a while. If you believe a thread should be locked, click on the triangle with an exclamation point in the post which is the reason you believe it should be locked. This is used to flag posts with any type of problem to the moderators; you can give an explanation such as, "This thread no longer has any finance content and should be locked," or, "This thread is a duplicate; please lock it and direct followups to this other thread."

Is the topic of ethical investing off limits? I would guess that it would be.

I raise this issue because of a recent post by an individual who was seeking advice regarding keeping his/her income very low. IMHO what he/she was looking for was not particularly ethical, although certainly legal. One could present a scenario and ask if it were ethical, for example.

A corollary: Would a thread inviting posters to list the types of posts to which they normally respond and those to which they do not be acceptable? If you read between the lines you could see that this could be a back door means of getting to the first question I raised.